Obama Gun Control Speech: It Won't Achieve Anything

We knew that Vice President Joe Biden’s gun task force was going to be a toothless publicity show, but not this bad. On Wednesday, President Obama signed 23 executive orders pertaining to gun control which are to serve as supplements to the strongest gun legislation proposed in two decades.

Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 6102 it is not. This flexing of Obama’s presidential muscle has all the seriousness of his 2009 order to close Guantánamo with the verbiage of a second-rate résumé. You can just picture White House staffers referring to a list of career-enlarging action words while throwing together today’s list of spineless executive orders, available at the link and abridged here:

— Issue a Presidential Memorandum to require federal agencies to make relevant data available to the federal background check system.

— Direct the Attorney General to review categories of individuals prohibited from having a gun to make sure dangerous people are not slipping through the cracks.

— Propose rule-making to give law enforcement the ability to run a full background check on an individual before returning a seized gun.

— Direct the Attorney General to issue a report on the availability and most effective use of new gun safety technologies and challenge the private sector to develop innovative technologies

— Clarify that the Affordable Care Act does not prohibit doctors asking their patients about guns in their homes.

— Launch a national dialogue led by secretaries Sebelius and Duncan on mental health.

In other words, the bluster leading up to this announcement is hereby to be divided into new kinds of bluster. Legislation to be proposed, reviews to be undertaken, nominations to be appointed, reports to be assigned: these are the remains of wasted ink and energy. At what point do we cross, “Launch a national dialogue about mental health” off of our national checklist? Before or after we decide whether the U.S. government should default on its obligations?

Obama would be quick to tell you that these are merely what are available under his power to do, that his real plan will be a bold step forward on gun control. Let’s see if he can get anything resembling the draconian bill he’s proposing through the House.